What was Andromeda missing?

Shows how much they actually care about the IP :/

Whoa, where do I begin?

- A "normal" UI, where you can mod your weapons, see your objectives, browse the journal and the codex.
- Music...I'm not saying every soundtrack should be "The Suicide Mission", but damn - ME:A's soundtrack was just flat, boring and non-inspiring.
- Characters; absolutely no feeling of attachment, no conflicts (Kalo and the engineer guy's back-and-forth intercom mouth-karate doesn't count). Even though I hated Ashley, I
always felt shitty, when I left her to die on Virmire. If I had to sacrifice a squadmate from ME:A, I wouldn't even bat an eye.
- The story: I really couldn't get into this pathfinder thing. I didn't feel like there were high stakes involved. I felt no darkness. I felt... nothing.
- The gameplay may have been a little more fluid, but the gameplay just didn't feel satisfying to me. The biotic/fire/cryo explosions in ME3 were damn satisfying with great sound effects, but ME:'s were just really meh. It absolutely didn't help, that you could not control your squadmates' powers.
- Picking the right squadmates didn't really matter, because of the lack of being able to control them. In the ME trilogy, I loved setting up explosions with Kaiden/Javik/Liara...etc. Here everybody just does what they do on their own, whenever they feel like it.
- The Tempest was a cheap knock-off of the Normandy, uninspired and boring.
- The conversations were way too light and "funny", and the lack of real renegade/paragon choices could be really felt. Bad idea reworking the system like this.
- To me, small things I liked in the trilogy, like everybody in the universe would holster their shotgun horizontally on their lower backs and the ammo type would show on the weapon with a small hologram. Here all the guns go to the same place vertically, and pistols/SMGs don't even show most of the time.
- Racial diversity. I still laugh my arse off when I overhear a vorcha from ME3, or enjoy a conversation with a volus ("I own you!"), or listen to a story from an elcor. The lack of the "old" species were really left a gaping hole, and I find the angara boring and ugly as shit.
- A balanced and non-microtransaction-oriented (4 versions of each weapon) Multiplayer. (I could write about a whole book why MP failed, too).
- BUGS
- Graphics; every asari looks the same (except for Pee Bee)?! ME1 with the limited memory of a 360 was able to pull off at least 15-20 different asari faces, for fuck's sake!
- Our "hero"; I - as a 34 year-old dude - could not get into playing as an adolescent idiot, with cringy dialogues. My FemShep was a bad-ass, while Sara is a whiny-ass, pumpkin latte-sipping millenial little bitch.

It's mediocre to it's core. You shoot up a lot of generic enemies and that's about it. Expectations were probably higher for a Bioware game, and rightfully so.

MEA is neither good nor outright bad. For reasons given above. Not least of all that many people, me included, didn't give a shit for the companions. Usually the life saver of any Bioware game that makes you put up with mediocrity in other departments.

No, this game swims with the crowd of countless games, soon to be forgotten. And that's it's major problem. The absence of any memorable moments.

Don't forget the blackjack.

Indeed. The mistake was Andromeda not yet having the kind of backstory Mass Effect 1 and its cast had, yet still focusing on exposition-heavy squaddies and otherwise not creating any moments of tension between them and Shepard. Big misjudgement on Mac's part and he just needs to remember what he did with Wrex in ME1 or the various squaddie vs squaddie standoff in ME2.

What was missing ?

Many things I think, but there was one thing MEA definitely didn't have - EMOTIONAL IMPACT. Countless times during replaying MET i've been having those WTF moments, tears in my eyes, sadness etc. Nothing like this ever happened during my Andromeda trip. NOT EVEN ONCE. I think the other thing, which personally kills "feeling" for MEA was lack of memorable background music. Soundtrack was just bad - simply as that.
Companions ? Well, most of them on Jacob's level, but there was Drack and Vetra so i could live with that.

Story also didn't really work for me. New galaxy, only 2 new species, all this flying between planets just to discover some "volcano" meh.

It could be done 100 times better; i can bet that most of the people on BSN easily could write much more interesting and entertaining story than MEA deliver.

Mac aside, they had some legitimate arcs in ME:A but you can tell from the inconsistency of the writing that we got a lot of "that will have to do" to get the game out in time for EA's Q4 2016.  He did some solid writing on Garrus and Wrex and maybe that's where his strengths lie  - in creating characters with solid narrative arcs - and maybe it falls apart in the overall macro-arc of the story.  The guy wasn't even on ME:A until things appeared desperate, so he left "Anthem" and did his best to save the day.  In the end, the game was enough of financial success to be noted so in investor calls but online presence didn't necessitate continued support above their new, highly-invested IP and the successful Dragon Age franchise.  Obviously, we saw the aftermath with EA Motive absorbing BioWare Montreal but BioWare Edmonton is moving or has moved into bigger offices recently so it makes me wonder if they've learned their lesson from trying to create these big projects remotely and what you'll see in the future is an expanded Edmonton staff to handle all things Dragon Age and Mass Effect in the future.

What I disliked the most about ME Andromeda is how extremely safe Bioware played it with this game. The setting of this game would have been absolutely perfect to go completely out of the box for once, but they totally missed it. They played it extremely safe not to alienate (pun intended) the Mass Effect fans, to make the game feel very similar to the previous games despite having a totally different location and plot. And that is what lead this game to total mediocrity. 

I mean, heck, we are traveling to a completely new galaxy and all we find is bipedal species who are all on very similar technological levels and have similar cognitive abilities and understandings as humans, light years away. Jungle Planets that only differ from ours in the way that most of the vegetation is fluorescent? Not one but two desert planets that look like...well, deserts on earth? Primitive lifeforms that perfectly resemble dinosaurs?

Just for en example, we know of planets which are nearly completely made of diamond, there is a planet where rain consist of rubies, there are brown dwarf stars that are so cold you can walk on them etc. Yes I get it, we were looking for a new earth, environments that are not hostile to life which are bound to be somewhat earth-like, but Bioware completely overplayed it with the similarities. Remember the mission on the mining site on the asteroid? That was one of the few really cool missions were I actually felt like being in a foreign place, in space, in another galaxy.  There should have been many missions like that. 

Oh and speaking of lifeforms, scientists are already speculating that inorganic lifeforms could possibly exist, made of crystal or mercury. Now thats something unique and interesting, why didn't we encounter any lifeforms like that?  

Nothing in the game felt new, strange or interesting, I never felt like I'm an explorer in another galaxy. Bioware has been playing it very safe for for three Mass Effect Games, this was their chance to go out of the box for once, in fact it was actually high time for them to do so, and they completely and utterly blew it.

Next up is illogical decisions. You are part of a ridiculously expensive and risky mission that intends to go to another galaxy with veeery little basic information gathered by long range scanners. And you are doing that militarily completely under equipped. Basically you risk handing over thousands of defenseless civilian settlers to a foreign powerful species that may call this place their home.  Thats such a dumb move, and of course it hurt the initiative. And thats from species that fought several hard wars in the milky way, and know about an hostile and extremely dangerous species that threaten to destroy all intelligent life in the vicinity. Make no sense. And speaking of sense, its only a minor flaw but no, having a wheeled APC does not make any sense either. 

Lastly, the plot was extremely straight-forward too, Bioware playing it safe again. The bad guys could not have been any more stereotypical. 

To go back to the thread title again - What was Andromeda Missing- ? Innovation and creativity in all areas - Or the balls to actually implement it. 

Everything that makes a Bioware game good

Knock them out and drag them home by the dozens? Works for me. 

My advice for a replay is to adjust the sound volumes. Change it to roughly these levels:

Music = 100%
Dialogue = 75%
Sound Effects = 65%

I found that brought out the music a lot more and I realised how good the music is.